The Must-Have Four Features Your Digital Ecosystem Needs
This month, Digizuite was a sponsor for inRiver’s online conference, PIMPoint Digital – a three-day, dynamic product information event that focused on the future of digital commerce.
PIMPoint’s official theme was “Opening the Digital Front Door,” and it was filled with live keynote speaking sessions, panel discussions, and networking opportunities. Speakers were experts and representatives from inRiver, as well as an assortment of partners and customers, including Salesforce, Bugaboo, Hyster-Yale, translations.com, and Comma Group.
We came away from the event with many valuable eCommerce perspectives. But if we had to name one key takeaway, it would be this – If you want to maximize business potential, you need to prioritize the customer experience and create rewarding buying journeys, rather than focus on just selling the product.
In fact, according to the 2021 Achieving Customer Amazement Survey Report, 52 percent of consumers would pay more for a product if they knew it came with superior customer service.
The buying journey can be long and winding for customers, and they expect the best at every turn – from prospects first learning about a brand all the way to customers going forward with a final sale (and hopefully beyond). Luckily for us, PIMPoint 2021 taught us a thing or two on how to provide the eCommerce experiences that people are looking for today.
Four features your digital ecosystem needs
Following are four must-have features and functionalities every brand should consider when developing or improving their digital ecosystem:
INTEGRATED AND AGILE
We all know that eCommerce rules these days – so much so that B2B companies are investing 80% in digital commerce, and one-third of these companies are already seeing half of their revenue coming from this avenue
With so many people making more and more online purchases, it is crucial to pave a simple, easy, and intuitive digital journey for all your customers. And, you can’t rely on just one single technology to optimize every digital experience.
Instead, to provide the ideal eCommerce experience, businesses must work with a collection of integrated technology solutions that complement each other – that collectively function as one giant, comprehensive solution. By integrating your marketing technology systems, you will never need duplicate work in multiple platforms, logging in and out of different marketing technologies to publish or update content on different digital channels. This simplified experience on the back end enables a cohesive end-to-end customer journey on the other side.
For example, both your employees and customers benefit when your DAM, PIM, and CMS are all integrated. Edits that you make to digital assets or product information on any channel are automatically updated everywhere, guaranteeing that information on every single channel is up-to-date, accurate, and consistent with current brand messaging.
Creating and delivering eCommerce content involves multiple software platforms, and connecting them all allows for automation across the entire lifecycle of every piece of content. By removing time-consuming, manual, and even mindless processes for your content creators and revenue teams, you achieve better speed-to-market. As one panelist stated, “the impact of [each step of the customer journey] is greater with a connected digital ecosystem.”
Ideally, every platform in your technology stack should be vendor agnostic to allow for the highest level of integration. This way, your digital ecosystem in general is flexible and can grow with your company, without requiring a dramatic reconfiguration when you need to introduce new technologies or perform any software upgrades. As a result, you can best focus on your customers and getting products and services to market as quickly as possible.
ENABLE OMNICHANNEL CUSTOMER JOURNEYS
Not only should your platforms integrate – they should also facilitate omnichannel customer experiences. (And, as defined in our last blog, the omnichannel approach allows businesses to provide “an integrated, seamless customer experience across multiple channels and touchpoints”).
If we didn’t know it before PIMPoint, we know now that the omnichannel revolution is certainly here. These days, customers across all industries want a mix of virtual and in-person experiences with a brand. And, as they transition to and from each touch point, whether virtual or face-to-face, they want uniformity in brand messaging and product information. They want to feel as though their buying journey is one uninterrupted process, not a collection of staccato, independent interactions.
For example, in a PIMPoint panel, one luxury retailer – Cartier – explained that, before the pandemic, most of its customers’ first touchpoints with the brand were in-person, in-store. Cartier was even known for its glossy catalogues.
Now, Cartier relies on delivering fantastic digital customer experiences and then polishing off the buyer journey with equally terrific in-store experiences. When people come into the store to make the final purchase, people get the same taste of the brand that they got online.
You can harmonize the customer journey with software that allows you to easily deliver consistent messaging across all virtual and physical channels. The right technology setup makes it quick and easy to simultaneously update the content on your website and social media channels while also ensuring that the most up-to-date product videos are being used in-store or on distributor websites.
You also need a platform that allows you to store, edit, manage, and publish rich media assets, all from one place. And, this is exactly what a best-of-breed, vendor-agnostic DAM provides.
METRICS AND FEEDBACK LOOPS
You are the expert of your own products and services, so it would be easy to rely on in-house opinions for product development and upgrades. It would also be understandable for marketing teams to assume that they know best how to communicate with customers about products and services.
However, the experts of what customers want from a company are the people actually buying (and not buying) what you are putting on the market. So, it is crucial to listen to your customers and incorporate their feedback into what you provide.
It’s not just digital surveys that are important. You also need technologies that allow you to make data-driven decisions, that provide you with business intelligence and easy-to-digest metrics about what is selling online, and what isn’t.
It’s interesting to ponder what one PIMPoint panelist revealed: when it comes to eCommerce, sometimes it’s a matter of turning a shoe the right way in photos to stimulate better sales. You need data to figure out what digital assets you need, and how to deliver them, in order to represent your products in a way that leads to more sales.
GLOBAL-FRIENDLY
To maximize opportunities, you must communicate with every customer (and prospective customer) on the planet. And, this requires more than just simple global exposure. It means providing optimal, tailored customer experiences to everyone. This personalization is based on many factors, and geographic location is an important one.
For one, even though a considerable percentage of the world speaks English as a second language, these people would most likely prefer a customer experience in their native language over English.
Not only should customers only encounter content in their preferred language, but they should only see ads and receive communication about products and services that are easily available in their part of the world. Little is more frustrating than getting excited to learn more about something, only to find out it’s not even possible to access.
Also, digital experience and customer service should be up, running, and available all day, every day so that customers can find you even in the middle of the night, or from their mobile devices. Mobile capabilities are increasingly important; we learned at PIMPoint that COVID-19 increased mobile engagement by 250%.
The bottom line: no matter where people are in the world and despite the time zone they are in, they should be able to move along their discovery and buying journeys without any roadblocks to steer them in other directions.
To satisfy all these global requirements, you need to work exclusively with technologies that have sophisticated language conversion capabilities and allow you to deliver content only where it is relevant. Businesses should also only leverage software that allows them to produce mobile-friendly digital experiences.
Conclusion: Enterprise technology matters to your customers
Finding the right enterprise technology can be a daunting task. Software applications can range in both price and functionality. The list of features for every type of software can seem exhaustive, even nuanced, so it’s difficult to determine what is necessary and what isn’t.
Just remember: all the systems in your tech stack should contribute to the growth of your business – to reaching more people with compelling customer experiences (that have a human touch).
There are a lot of options for your digital ecosystem, but as we learned at PIMPoint, the technologies that your company uses for eCommerce should always:
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Be integrated and agile, performing as one holistic solution
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Facilitate the delivery of interactive omnichannel customer experiences
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Provide metrics and business insights that help users make data-driven decisions
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Allow global businesses to reach all of their customers with personalized digital experiences
The pandemic drove us to explore digital alternatives to everything we do. It also revealed how important it is to humanize every experience, even those that happen online. Only with the right technologies can companies provide such compelling touch points.
Ready for the omnichannel revolution?
Going omnichannel requires the right know-how, strategy and tools.
Many companies tell us that they’d like to get started, but not sure how.
Contact us for a free, personalized assessment of where you are today and some inspiration on next steps.
